From the author of

From the author of

What’s a "Live CD"?

A live CD provides a means of putting an entire computer operating
system, applications, and data (music, documents, video, or anything else) on a
single, bootable disc. That live CD can be a specialized desktop, a gaming CD,
or a fully functioning web server. And although it’s usually called a
"live CD," the same basic procedure can be used to produce an ISO
image that can be used on a "live" DVD, USB flash drive, or other
bootable media.

NOTE

The Fedora Project recently replaced the Kadischi live CD creation tools with livecd-creator. When I wrote the book Live Linux CDs: Building and Customizing Bootables,
I described Kadischi, since it was still being used at that time. If you bought
the book, I recommend that you use this article to create Fedora live CDs,
rather than the Kadischi descriptions in Chapter 7 of the book.

If you want to spin your own Linux live CD, the Fedora project is one of the
best places to start. With Fedora’s livecd-creator, you can build
a live ISO image with these characteristics:

Tailored to include the exact packages you want from the Fedora software
repository, plus any other third-party or personal yum software
repositories you can access.

Created from a Fedora kickstart file, so you can easily modify and rebuild
an image.

Includes personal settings such as the keyboard, time zone, firewall, video
card, network, and active services. (You can even tack on specialized desktop
settings and any data you like.)

Used to install the contents of the ISO image to hard drive, for a permanent
desktop or server install.

The livecd-creator command is packaged in the livecd-tools package, along with more than a dozen sample kickstart files. These kickstart
files can be used to build your own specialized live CD immediately, including a
GNOME desktop, KDE desktop, developer workstation, electronic lab workstation,
gaming desktop, or a minimal Fedora system.

I used Fedora 8 on an i386 platform to create the examples shown in this
article. However, livecd-creator also should work on other platforms
that run Fedora 8, such as PPC and x86_64 architectures. Although livecd-creator is being developed in Fedora, other groups are working
on ways to get it working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS as well.

NOTE

The livecd-creator project is in active development. Due to this
ongoing process, the project sometimes breaks for a short time or gets new,
undocumented features. If you have questions or problems, I strongly suggest
subscribing to the Fedora-livecd-list mailing list.